


Breathing Underwater

by indevan



Series: Rock Band AU [46]
Category: Dragon Ball
Genre: Alternate Universe - Rock Band, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Mental Health Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-10-03 06:22:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17278724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indevan/pseuds/indevan
Summary: “No,” he repeats more firmly. “I’m not setting foot on that fucking stage.”He hasn’t planned on saying that, but the words are out of his mouth and he realizes he means them.  He can’t go out there, he can’t go on that stage named after his mother where she used to stand





	Breathing Underwater

The building is a far cry from the dives they normally play.  Vegeta knows it well, but he doesn’t say so. Doesn’t say anything when the car King Kai called for them pulls up.

“We’re playing here?” Kakarrot asks, not even bothering to hide his disbelief.

“I feel like we aren’t fancy enough to even get in,” Raditz mutters.

And maybe it’s true.  The building is grand with its columns and apparent historical significance.  Vegeta just knows that he hasn’t set foot in it since he was a child. They get out of the car and stand assembled outside the theatre as if they were children on a class trip.

“Is King Kai meeting us out here or what?” Turles asks because, naturally, he would be the one to speak up.

“I dunno.”

As if summoned by their questions, their manager pops out from one of the large, wooden double doors and hurries down the steps.

“Oh, good, you’re on time.”

Raditz pulls a face. “You literally called us a car.”

“You say that as if that would stop any of you.”

They’ve long since stopped arguing with King Kai when he brings up their less than stellar record when it comes to punctuality.  Vegeta doesn’t care to argue currently. His hand twitches near his jacket pocket where he knows his pack of cigarettes is, but he doesn’t get one out.  He knows far too well that smoking isn’t allowed in the theatre.

“You’re playing here tomorrow night,” King Kai says. “Whis set it up.  His sister owns this place or something and you and a few others are doing a charity event for the Lordes.”

It’s the first he’s heard of it but he isn’t surprised at Whis pulling fast ones.  He and his husband have taken a weird shine to them but, then again, Whis is their press agent, not every band on the label’s.  Raditz told them that Sadistic Dance doesn’t even have a press agent. It makes sense. The five of them are the ones who need to be coached on how not to be dumbasses in interviews, after all.

“Why are we now, then?” Kakarrot asks.

“To tour the place and do a quick acoustics check,” King Kai says.

“But you said other bands are playing,” Broly says in that mumbling way of his. “We’re the only ones here.”

King Kai looks askance and that’s really all he has to say.

“We want to make sure you don’t have any mishaps.”

He flicks his gaze to Kakarrot who cringes.

“C’mon!  I electrocuted myself  _ one time. _  It’s not a big deal.”

King Kai continues to look at him as he speaks. “This building is old and there are some faulty wiring situations.”

Vegeta knows that, too.  Been in the audience when sound cut off and the actors had to project on their own, even more than before.

“Now get inside, Ms. Angellus is waiting.”

It takes Vegeta a moment to realize that Angellus must be Whis’s last name before he took his husband’s and that it sounds weirdly familiar and he isn’t sure why.  Feeling again like children, the five of them follow King Kai into the building. Inside the lobby with its arched ceilings and faux marble floor, a diminutive woman waits for them.  She grins as they approach.

“This is Ms. Angellus,” King Kai says, adjusting his glasses. “Ms. Angellus, this is Apetail--the ones I told you about.”

He can just imagine how that conversation went.

“This is Kakarrot, Raditz, Turles, Broly, and--”

“GeeGee!”

He’s startled by the old nickname, the one only one person ever called him and, before he knows what’s happening, Ms. Angellus is hugging him tightly.

“Oh, wow!” she enthuses. “It’s been so long.”

Has it?  Vegeta pulls out of her embrace and takes in the woman more clearly.  She’s short and her hair is pulled to the side in a braid. He figures that she’s maybe in her late forties, early fifties, but she looks younger.

“I haven’t seen you since the…” Her eyes drop. “Well, you know.”

_ Oh. _

It clicks into place that she’s one of his mother’s friends from the theatre.  Someone she performed with. Someone who probably tried to help like his father had before he gave up on her.  Maybe this woman did, too. She makes herself perk back up and smiles again.

“But look at you!  You’ve gotten so tall.”

“No I haven’t.”

It’s all he can think to say and it makes her laugh.  She turns to the others, standing close like an old friend.

“I was in the hospital when he was born,” she says.

Vegeta thinks he knew that but there are substantial gaps in a lot of his childhood memories.

“GeeGee?” Turles asks, cracking a grin.

He shoots him a glare and he backs off, holding his hands out in mock surrender.

“I was with Guli here when she went into labor two months early and drove her to the hospital.”

“Who?” This from King Kai.

“Argulia Prince,” Ms. Angellus clarifies.

“My mother,” Vegeta finishes.

He sees the looks on his bandmates’ faces as they register the significance and fights back a scowl.  Being here is weird. He hasn’t been here since he was eight and his mother stopped performing as she got worse and worse.  When she refused to leave the house most days.

A memory surfaces from the funeral, when he stood there numb and cold and disbelieving that his mother was being put in the ground.  A woman hugging him and his brother and telling them how sorry she was. It was her--but she wasn’t Ms. Angellus then. She was Miss Cus, his mother’s best friend.

“We named one of the theatres here after her,” she tells him. “And have her portrait up next to it.”

His stomach sinks thinking about it and, briefly, he hates himself at how he doesn’t think he’ll be over it.  Cus walks them through the various parts of the theatre, talking about when it was built and the luminaries that walked its halls.  The ballet, the orchestra, the musicals, and plays. The two theatres--one of which named after his mother. He sees the heavy, gilded gold frame next to it and in it is a picture of his mother, smiling and made up in the costume she wore when she was Queen Titania.  He feels Kakarrot’s hand on his shoulder but only just barely. He’s in the photo, dressed as one of the fairies with sparkly blue wings and glitter on his cheeks. The same one is in one of their photo albums that his father keeps buried in the back of his closet.

“You were a cute little kid,” Turles says, voice forcibly jovial. “What happened?”

He means it as a joke and he tries to make himself laugh, but he can’t.  How can he even fucking perform here if walking through and seeing a picture is enough to make his jaw clench and his shoulders tense.

“Guli was always showing you off when you were a baby,” Cus says.  She probably thinks she’s helping, but it just makes the weird feeling in his stomach worse. “She basically forced the director to put you in shows.”

King Kai seems to have clued into the tension because he clears his throat loudly and says, “Right.  Boys, why don’t we get on with the sound check? I brought some instruments from the studio to check the acoustics but you can use your stuff tomorrow.”

“No,” Vegeta says, his vocal cords finally engaging.

King Kai stares at him and then huffs a sigh.

“Alright.  I guess I can call Jaco and tell him to bring your things, but if they’re at your houses it’ll be--”

“No,” he repeats more firmly. “I’m not setting foot on that fucking stage.”

He hasn’t planned on saying that, but the words are out of his mouth and he realizes he means them.  He can’t go out there, he can’t go on that stage named after his mother where she used to stand. Where he ran off after his death scene in Les Mis and asked her if she was proud of him.  King Kai sighs again.

“Vegeta, be reasonable.”

He doesn’t hear King Kai when he says it.  He doesn’t hear the exasperated intonations of his manager who’s put up with their shit for years now.  He hears his father. When he didn’t want to get out of bed for the funeral.  _ Vegeta, be reasonable. _  When he was screaming and crying because he found his mother’s body and wouldn’t calm down.   _ Calm down, just calm down! _

“Fuck this,” he says gruffly before turning on his foot and leaving.

He leaves the group and then the building before he even realizes he’s outside.  He isn’t sure about why. It isn’t just his mother or the plaque with her name on it or the picture of her holding him as a toddler.  It goes beyond that and he can’t figure out why. He  _ thought _ he was getting better and even seeing Cus and being in the theatre didn’t trigger this fucking fight or flight response.  There’s something gnawing at his head and he doesn’t know what it is. That’s scarier than anything else.

\--

It hits him when he’s sitting on the train.  Somehow he managed to get his shit together to scan his metrocard and get on the right train at the right time, but it isn’t until he’s found a seat near the door does it hit him.

It isn’t the theatre and it isn’t photographs and plaques or anything.  It’s all the things Cus said. How she carried him around proudly. How she insisted that he be in shows.  One thing he never questioned was his mother’s love for him. When she died, Tarble had asked him if she didn’t love them because she didn’t want to be with them anymore and Vegeta had told him that he was stupid and that of course she loved them.  He never questioned why she killed herself. He saw it. Saw her getting worse and worse. But on her good days, he was still her little prince. She still listened to him play guitar and said how good he sounded.

Because mental illness is a hell of a fucking thing.

And he knows it.  He’s felt it and he’s gotten his shit adjusted and things are okay, but what if they aren’t?

A robotic voice calls out his stop and Vegeta gets to his feet, letting his body move on autopilot.  He mounts the stairs to the above ground and this time when he reaches for his pack of cigarettes, he actually gets one out and lights it.  Inhales deeply. In his mind’s eye, he sees the picture of him and his mother, but then it changes. It’s him holding Trunks on his shoulders like he did at their show last week.  Showing off his son to everyone backstage and telling them how, with assistance, he can play a chord on his own. A plaque with his goddamn name on it because Kakarrot got them to name something after him because he’s dead.  He’s dead like she is because, at the end of the day, he can’t fight it either. Leaving nothing but a body for his son to find and scream, but it’ll be okay because Bulma would handle it better than his father. She wouldn’t tell Trunks to be reasonable or to stop crying.

He drops ash on the sidewalk and breathes smoke out.

This is dangerous thinking and a path he has actively tried not to let himself take but he’s on it and he can’t stop.  He knows if he steps on that stage, it’ll come back and he’ll freeze up. Run off. He’ll show that he’s weak.

Vegeta lets himself into the apartment and Bulma looks up from the stack of papers she’s grading.  She smiles at him.

“Oh, hey!” She puts her pen down and gets to her feet. “You’re back early.”

Trunks turns away from the TV where he had been watching that show with the annoying little girl who peppered her sentences with unnecessary French and pelts towards him.

“Daddy!”

The image again.  His mom, him. The same.  Trunks, older, screaming and screaming because of the inevitable.  Why his dad claims he lashed out and held him at arm’s length. The fear of him turning out just like her.

He walks past him with his outspread arms and goes into the bedroom.  His mind needs to quiet. He needs to balance out. Part of him wants to scream, another wants to lash out and punch the wall, but he does neither.  He sits on the bed and stares at the wall. Through the wall he hears Trunks ask Bulma what’s wrong with him in that bald-faced way only three-year-olds can.

“I don’t know, sweetie.”

With a shaking hand, he takes his phone out of his pocket to see that, somehow he missed getting the notification for several texts, all from Kakarrot.

**Kakarrot:** _where did you go?  are you ok?_

**Kakarrot:** _ hey king kai is big mad (to use one of goten’s phrases) about you walking out and he’s demanding to know why. i said it’s your business but he was pissy about it _

He scrolls down to the next one.

**Kakarrot:** _that angel lady told him anyway and he feels bad now and says he might talk to whis about changing the venue for tomorrow_

Great, now King Kai knows.  And Whis will, too, or maybe he did already.  Maybe his sister told him about her best friend who killed herself when she was thirty-six, before she was even forty.  Ten years older than he is now. He texts back.

**(You):** _don’t change it.  don’t fucking do anything_

After a moment, he sends another to tell him that he went home.  He’s tossing his phone onto the nightstand when there’s a soft knock at the door.

“Babe?”

A memory surfaces.  His mother having locked herself in the bedroom while his father stands on the other side, trying to be patient.  Vegeta knows that his dad was a shit father but he always tried to be a good husband. Always loved her and still does.  He remembers him trying to get her to unlock the door, saying that it’ll be okay and he’ll help her. He doesn’t want that to be him.  He’s on medication to stop it. He actively tries not to fuck up his partnership and his child to avoid it.

“Come in.”

Bulma opens the door, look at him.

“Can I turn the light on?”

He hasn’t even realized that it’s been off this whole time.  He shrugs and she doesn’t flick the switch on. She crosses to the bed and sits next to him, nearly touching him but not quite.

“What happened today?” she asks.

He draws in a breath through his nose and exhales out his mouth.

“We went to where we’re playing that charity thing tomorrow night,” he says. “It’s the theatre where my mother used to perform.”

Bulma leans against him, places her hand on his chest.

“Oh, baby.”

He doesn’t want her pity but he appreciates the contact.  He lifts his arm to wrap it around her and pull her close.  Smell the fruity shampoo she wears and the weight of her against him.

“It wasn’t that,” he says to try and put it into words because that’s their promise to each other.  A promise he can’t break even in this weird fucking mood. “It’s that people there remember her how she was.  They had a picture of her up on the wall, and.”

Vegeta pauses, unsure how to say it.  Saying it out loud just seems foolish.  Bulma will call him out on how irrational it is and he’d be inclined to agree.

“What if that’s me?” he says finally. “What if I’m the one with my picture on the wall as people remember me.  A picture of me and Trunks that he’ll have to see and remember he walked in on his dad’s body.”

Bulma’s hand tenses against his chest and she lifts her head to look at him, blue eyes discernible even in the gloom of their room.

“Don’t say that,” she says. “Don’t you ever say that.  Please.”

Annoyance flares that he tries to tamp down because he can’t honestly blame her.

“I’m not.  I’ve never actively been suicidal,” he says.

Passively, sure.  Self-destructive, naturally.

“But the fear is there,” she says, completing his thought.

Maybe that’s why they work, the two of them.  Maybe she’s felt it, too. Bulma has offhand alluded to some instances in her youth, but she’s never been forthright and he gets it so he doesn’t force her.

“You aren’t her,” she tells him. “You aren’t your mother.  You’re you and you’re fighting against whatever goes on in your head.”

Bulma kisses him and he kisses back, letting her words register.  She’s right and he knows it, but today caught him off-guard. He feels weak and dumb, but not as bad as before.  He wraps his arms around Bulma and pulls her close.

“I told Trunks to wait for me to talk to you but he thinks you’re mad at him.  You should go out and watch  _ Fancy Nancy _ with him while I order dinner.”

He pulls a face. “I hate Fancy Nancy.  She’s a punk ass bitch.”

“She is,” Bulma agrees. “But Trunks likes the show.”

Vegeta exhales again and pulls away.

“In a sec,” he says. “I have to make a call.”

The words are out before his brain registers them but he lets it go by.  Bulma nods and goes back into the living room.

“Daddy!” he hears Trunks call indignantly.

“Daddy will be right out,” Bulma promises.

Vegeta goes to the nightstand and picks up his phone.  There’s a message from Kakarrot displayed.

**(Kakarrot):** _ okay if you’re sure.  tomorrow? _

He confirms his attendance even if he really isn’t entirely sure.  Even if he doesn’t want to hear Cus’s memories of her time with his mother.  He flips to his contacts and chews his lip as his thumb hovers over the call button.  Finally, he presses it and waits for it to ring.

“Vegeta?”

His father sounds surprised and nearly skeptical.

“Hey,” he says gruffly. “I haven’t forgiven you so don’t think this is about that.”

A harsh laugh. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

He thinks about his father’s steps in trying to make up for being a shitty father.  For everything he said and did. He doesn’t buy it quite yet, but that isn’t why he’s calling.  It’s the memories. His father on the other side of the door, talking to his mother through it. Bulma sitting by him on the bed, hugging him and reassuring him.

“We’re doing a charity gig tomorrow at mom’s old theatre,” he says. “There’s still tickets available if you want to come.”

There’s a pause on the other line and Vegeta wonders if his father thinks that he’s kidding him, which makes sense considering his reaction the last time he saw his father at a charity event.

“What time?”

“Show starts at seven.  It’s an early thing.”

This isn’t an olive branch, really, but he thinks he can open up a little.  Let his father into his life slowly.

“I never liked your music,” his dad says finally.

He nearly snarls for him to fuck off, but somethings stops him from saying it.  He knows his father isn’t done speaking.

“She did, though.  She kept saying you were going to be famous and I guess she was right.”

It’s the most direct way he has talked about his mother in years.  Everything else has been allusions or roundabout ways of bringing her up.

“Yeah.”

“Is Tarble going?”

“His boyfriend is performing it so yeah.”

He can almost hear his dad shaking his head on the other line.

“Boyfriend, right.  The new one--I heard about that whole thing.  Your influence?”

Vegeta rolls his eyes.

“No, I did not tell Tarble to cheat on his boyfriend.  I called him out for it.”

“Oh, that’s good.  Will your girlfriend be there?”

“Yeah.”

“What about my grandson?”

He exhales, exasperated.

“Probably.  Christ, do you want the whole guest list or something?”

His father laughs and it’s.  It’s almost normal. A banal conversation between father and son, one he hasn’t had with him in nearly a decade.  Maybe it’s progress. Maybe.

“Alright.  I’ll be there.”

“Okay.  Bye.”

“Bye.”

They hang up without an exchange of “I love you” because Vegeta knows it would be disingenuous and automatic.  They aren’t there yet. His father didn’t call him his  _ tesoro _ like his mother did because she was all about nicknames and terms of endearment.  He puts his phone back down and walks into the living room. Trunks curls near him the second he sits down on the couch and he puts his hand on his head.  Bulma’s typing in their takeout order and--she was right. He’s not her. He strokes Trunks’s hair absently as he pretends to pay attention to whatever toddler show is on now.  He won’t end up a picture on the wall.


End file.
